1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a digital camera and, more particularly, to a digital camera which causes an image pickup element to photograph an object to obtain image data expressing an object image.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, with higher resolution of image pickup elements such as CCDs (Charge Coupled Device) and CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) image sensors, the number of pixels of digital cameras has increased, and digital cameras surpassing ten million pixels have been developed. With digital cameras, when the number of pixels of an image increases, the amount of data processing per photographing operation increases, and the image capture interval (waiting time until the next photographing operation can be made) becomes longer. For this reason, the following technique (Patent Document: Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (JP-A) No. 10-23365) has been proposed. That is, a plurality of recording units for recording digital image data (hereinafter to be referred to as “image data”) obtained by a photographing operation is arranged in a digital camera, and the image data are recorded in parallel with the plurality of recording units.
However, the conventional technique aimed to increase the speed of a recording process of image data. Thus, the speed could not be increased in photographing signal processing such as defective pixel correction, edge emphasizing process, and Y-C conversion process, which are conducted on the image data before the recording process. Therefore, there was a limit to the extent to which the image capture interval could be shortened.
In order to increase the speed of photographing signal processing, image data of one picture obtained by one photographing operation may be divided, and photographing signal processing of one image may be shared (parallel processing) by a plurality of processors. However, since the photographing signal processing includes an interpolating process using a large number of peripheral pixels, the interpolating process cannot be performed to the pixels near a position where the image data is divided by merely dividing the image data. For this reason, when the images processed by the respective processors are joined with each other, image breakage occurs at a joined portion.